Breakfast
by Stealth Dragon
Summary: Sheppard needs help, his team is there for him. Rated for mentions of torture but nothing graphic. Gen, team fic but John centric.


Breakfast

It began with a beating, bruising but not breaking so as to subdue the newest merchandise enough to be a little less trouble. John didn't get it at first. A beating slowed you but it didn't really subdue you, and as soon as the dizziness stopped he resumed making escape plans.

Then he had the water and thought it had tasted funny. Combined with the beatings, it turned his limbs to led and his brain to mush, yet they still expected him to march – all day and into part of the night. They weren't supposed to be doing this, this wasn't even supposed to exist, so they kept the merchandise moving and, therefore, difficult to locate.

When the merchandise was brought to a favorable spot, the task masters forced them with whips, rifle butts to the spine and curses in a language John couldn't fathom to build their own prisons.

A pit in the ground, with fifteen people to a pit adding bruises on top of bruises if you so much as shifted to get more comfortable.

And the food... crap, the food. It wasn't food, it was the illusion of food tricking the body into thinking it was full. John supposed it must have had some nutritional value or they'd all be dead by now. Just not enough nutrition to make the merchandise strong. It didn't matter the condition of the merchandise so long as it was weak enough to be controlled while strong enough to work and not drop too soon. John supposed that was why new, strong bodies were added to the mass on an almost daily bases - to replenish supplies. It was a quick, dirty way to make a living, because if the buyers were that desperate for flesh for whatever purpose, then they, too, wouldn't care about the condition of the flesh they bought. They could always nurse him or her back to the right amount of health to be useful.

The talk in the pits was that you could trade purchased flesh to the Wraith in return for not getting culled. What John wanted to know was how any of the buyers were able to locate this moving slave train in the first place. But came they did; every once in a while a clean face would peer down through the bars of the pit-cover and regard the people below like chickens for the butchering. And in between was marching until your feet bled, whips, rifle butts, crappy food, huddling in the mud for warmth or suffocating when the sun beat directly down.

That was how John's team found him: skinny, dirty and packed with the same in the bottom of a mud pit, huddled like frightened mice against the wall. The bark of his name in a painfully familiar bass voice had John looking up at the dred-framed face of Ronon. Then Teyla, then Rodney.

In a sudden fit of self-consciousness, John tugged the neck of his over-sized shirt back over the sharp knot of his shoulder. He gave his team a little wave.

"H-hey guys."

Everything after was a blur to his half-starved and drugged brain. The top had been removed, a ladder lowered for the strongest to climb out, leaving the weakest to be man-handled gently like children out of the pit by Ronon and two marines.

John was one of the weak ones, but he blamed it on his broken arm preventing him from climbing the ladder.

"Doesn't matter," Ronon said, subdued as John felt. He wrapped John in his coat and helped him up and out where a 'jumper waited to take him home.

SGA

Drugs always came with a price and that was withdrawal. It left John wide open to the fever that had always been there, never noticed until Keller took his temperature. It prevented him from being able to take any pain medication, so he was in constant agony. Broken ribs, broken arm and a broken collar bone made every breath and every minor movement torture until John was begging Ronon to stun him. And he was still subject to gruel, albeit a hell of a lot more nutritious gruel fed through a tube up his nose.

It was two weeks before he remembered what it was like not to be in pain. But it was still gruel filling him, morning, noon and night. Oatmeal and plain potatoes eventually followed, and it was Heaven.

Only when John was finally - ifinally/i - released from the infirmary was he given the go-ahead (more like encouragement) to eat richer, heavier foods. John definitely planned to, starting with breakfast – a massive breakfast of pancakes, eggs, bacon and fruit. He would eat until he felt ready to burst, to hell with possible indigestion.

He'd missed food like he'd never missed it before.

John entered the mess hall, the last to join the line. And, just his luck, they were out of bacon.

"Sorry, sir. The batch today was the last and we won't get more until the Daedalus arrives," the cook explained. "We got some sausage going but it's going to be a while."

The bacon wasn't the only food in short supply. There was no earth fruit, only the weird purple kiwis that always made John's throat itch. The orange juice was gone, leaving only cartons of skim milk. The only cereal was bran flakes, the only muffins poppy seed (not John's personal favorite) and when John tried to lift a plate stacked high with pancakes, he couldn't.

He couldn't lift a damn plate full of damn pancakes, not even slide it over onto his tray. He could barely lift the plate he set his muffin on without his arm shaking. And his tray, he couldn't even get that off the damn sliding bars. He finally abandoned it, tucking the milk into his sling and taking only the plate with the muffin just to spite his own arm. He barely made it to the table, where Rodney eyed his food choice with a lot of scorn.

"Please tell me that's just an appetizer," Rodney said.

John didn't look at him when he replied, "I'm not that hungry."

"So says the man who not three days ago was cajoling Keller for bacon and eggs. Give me a break."

John hunched broodingly over his muffin, lamenting over his seating choice. Rodney's tenacity was a good thing forty percent of the time; the other sixty percent it was a pain in the ass. He was never going to stop until either called away to remedy an emergency, or John told the truth.

John held out for the emergency.

"There was cereal," Ronon said. "Didn't look too good but probably better than a muffin."

"And there was Kolos fruit," said Teyla, bouncing Torren on her lap as she fed him some kind of beige mush from a Styrofoam bowl.

"Not really a fan of that stuff," John said. He picked off bites of muffin that he had to force down his throat with watery milk before his taste buds caught on. Not even a month and then some of starving could remedy his dislike for poppyseed. But food was still food and hunger still demanding. He'd eaten worse in the pits just to make it stop.

"That still leaves the cereal. And like it or not, Keller's not going to be happy when she finds out you're opting for a poor man's diet. You need to eat more, get more meat on your bones, get your energy back. You're never going to be cleared for the 'gate if you -"

"I couldn't carry it!" John snapped, his mouth two steps ahead of his brain, yet he didn't care. He refused to be reprimanded for something that wasn't his fault. "I wanted pancakes, I wanted bacon, but the bacon was gone and... I couldn't... couldn't lift the damn plates with the pancakes on them, all right?"

"Then why didn't you ask for help?"

John shrugged, picking off more bits that he didn't eat, just pinched into a pile of crumbs in the center of the plate. "Everyone else had their hands full. Or they were busy."

"You could have asked for our help," said Teyla.

"Didn't see you guys until after I left the line. Look, they said they were making some sausage. I'll just go back and get some, and cereal. It's no big deal."

Rodney rolled his eyes. "You are..."

"What, McKay," John challenged, hooding his gaze and tossing his muffin onto the plate. "I'm what?"

But Rodney being Rodney, he met the challenge, glaring back. "Stubborn. Admit it, you didn't want to bug anyone for the sake of pancakes. So you settled for less." That said, Rodney grabbed John's carton of skim and exchanged it with his own carton of whole milk. "Don't pretend you're all right. You're not. I mean, you're getting there, but you're not there yet and you won't get there at the rate you're going."

Ronon took John's plate, dumping the mutilated muffin onto his own tray. He then stabbed the top-two pancakes from his stack and slid them onto the plate. Teyla added two slices of bacon and half her orange.

John gaped. "Guys..." but didn't know how to finish that sentence. Gratitude battled with embarrassment, love with anger. Weakness had left him reliant on others and it was a hard fact to swallow. It shoved his weakness in his face.

But Rodney and Ronon were sharing food. They never shared food.

Gratitude trumped embarrassment, love smothered anger. The pancakes were a fourth eaten and soaked with syrup, the milk half gone and the bacon cold. It was still the best breakfast John had ever had.

"Thanks."

Ronon grasped his good shoulder, Teyla his wrist. Rodney nodded and cleared his throat. "Yes, well... You're welcome."

The best damn breakfast ever.

The End


End file.
